Dustin Hoffman (2012)

Quartet is of interest as Dustin Hoffman’s debut as a film director.  Because it was based on a play by Ronald Harwood I could justify going to see it, even though I’d determinedly avoided The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet is evidently aimed at the same ‘grey’ middle-class audience.  But the movie has what is, for me, a nightmare setting.  Beecham House is described as a home for ‘retired musicians’ but the community there is dominated by former opera singers.  A combination of the residents’ diminishing mental facilities and (according to Ronald Harwood) their undiminished desire for the limelight means they could burst into aria at any time – especially since they’re preparing for their annual concert to commemorate Verdi’s birthday, and Hoffman and Harwood provide little evidence to suggest that the denizens of Beecham House have any other interest in life.  They include the mild-mannered, vaguely superior Reginald (Tom Courtenay), deaf and dotty Cecily (‘Cissy’) (Pauline Collins) and shamelessly risqué Wilf (Billy Connolly).  The arrival at the home of the witheringly egocentric Jean Horton (Maggie Smith) is the plot’s catalyst.  If Jean can be persuaded to join the other three in the quartet from Rigoletto, it will be enough to persuade the director of the Verdi concert, Cedric Livingstone (Michael Gambon), to put them at the top of the bill – ahead of Ann Langley (Gwyneth Jones), who boasts incessantly of her past glories on stage and who was Jean’s inveterate rival during their professional careers.  There are two obstacles:  first, Jean is too self-regarding to want to debase her former greatness; second, she was, many years ago and for a matter of a few hours, married to Reg, who’s never seen her in the meantime.

Ronald Harwood’s screenplay is more shameless than I expected.  When Jean arrives, Dr Cogan (Sheridan Smith), the young medic in charge of Beecham House, informs her that the place takes its name from one of Britain’s most famous conductors.   (Perhaps the doctor comes out with this statement to check that each new arrival still has their faculties – a kind of classical music equivalent of ‘Who’s the Prime Minister?’)   In the next breath, Dr Cogan tells Jean that her room is as big as Ann Langley’s – just so as to remind her of their rivalry, as you would.  Reg, Cissy and Wilf take Jean out to dinner (it’s implausible that she agrees even to go) with the aim of getting her drunk and persuading her to sing the Rigoletto quartet.  Jean sees through the ruse.  Next morning, this woman – who is still avid for compliments on her appearance and wardrobe and  fiercely determined to keep a superior distance from the lesser lights of Beecham House – walks into the breakfast room in her dressing gown and nightdress in order to shout ‘Fuck you’ at Reg, in front of all the other residents.   Moments before the concert performance at the climax of the film, Cissy’s memory deserts her and she says she has to leave the premises immediately.  No sooner has this droplet of suspense been added to the mixture than her memory returns.

It’s something of a relief, after the look and sound of her in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (and Downton Abbey), that Maggie Smith isn’t being asked primarily to do a comic turn here.  Most of Quartet is so witless, though, that her delivery of Jean’s acidulous putdowns brought my face closer to cracking than anything else in the film.  There’s a bit of depth in the looks that Smith and Tom Courtenay exchange when Jean and Reg first meet up again – or, in his case, when he learns she’s coming to Beecham House.  Reg isn’t as crudely characterful as most of the other parts and Courtenay gives a decent (unexciting) performance.  Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins seem to be pretending to be geriatric, even though both of them have now turned seventy (Collins is only three years younger than Courtenay).  This is partly because, compared with Smith and Courtenay, they’re unsubtle actors but also, I think, because Harwood’s material and Hoffman’s handling of it exaggerate the old age of the characters for theatrical effect.   They are, for example, archaised by their names.   Harwood wrote the play in 1999 but it’s been ‘updated’ (references to Lady Gaga etc).  The principals in Quartet would have been born in the late 1930s (or even the following decade) – they’d have been no more likely to be christened Reginald and Cicely and Wilfred and Cedric than the Tom and Pauline and Billy and Michael who play them would have been[1].  Ronald Harwood suggests an antiquated – a somehow comfortable – idea of what old people are called.  He succeeds only in bringing to mind what Alan Bennett (or one of his characters) said about its being only a matter of time before nursing homes are full of Sharons and Kevins.

Michael Gambon makes Cedric as dreary a caricature as the script would suggest (he’s yet another inmate with incontinent big-headedness).  Sheridan Smith plays Dr Cogan commendably straight but she’s probably miscast (she has to suppress her natural vividness) in a feeble role. This is her debut in a bigtime movie – I hope it won’t harm her prospects of cinema work more deserving of her talents.  Andrew Sachs gives a more understated account of himself than many others and there are some agreeable people in smaller parts – Trevor Peacock and especially David Ryall, whose genuinely splenetic quality is manna from heaven.  I’d have liked to see more of this pair’s Flanagan and Allen routine at the concert but at least Ryall and Peacock are doing their own singing, as of course is Gwyneth Jones.  Perhaps to illustrate the point that opera singers have to rule the roost, she’s still a Dame in the credits whereas Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay and Ronald Harwood are de-titled.

Dustin Hoffman seems to have calculated that he could get such great performances out of the quartet that the fact we don’t hear them singing (or watch them miming to) the Rigoletto wouldn’t be anti-climactic.  He was probably wrong in any case – it’s difficult to lead up to a performance that doesn’t happen – but since the characters are too thin and shallow for the actors to do much with, and pretty well all that keeps you going is the expectation of what the quartet will be like back on the stage, it turns out to be a big mistake.  At one point a group of kids of school-leaving age visits Beecham House to hear Reg lecture on opera (this is where the Lady Gaga reference – cringingly awkward – occurs).  At the start of the lecture, Reg asks the kids what they think of opera.  The answer is given by a boy played by a young actor called Jumayn Hunter, who speaks in an uncertain, slightly hostile monotone.   After Reg has said his piece and the kids think there might be something to opera after all (as if), he asks the boy to explain his enthusiasm for rap.   This time the response is more conventional, so that the sequence can end in a friendly glow for all concerned, but the sudden reality of that Jumayn Hunter’s first response is electrifying.

Early on in Quartet someone asks, ‘Who was it said that being old isn’t for sissies?’  (Although the answer is supplied, I couldn’t, by the time the line was repeated towards the end, remember what it was.  This short-term memory loss hit home on a personal level – about the only thing in the movie that did.)  The closing credits include photographs of the cast when they were young actors or musicians and the effect of these is poignant.  Old age and loss of faculties are the antithesis of safety yet this film – made by and starring variously gifted elderly people – seems determined to be lulling and soothing about getting old and losing the abilities you once had.  There’s no sympathy shown for Jean Horton’s fear of letting audiences hear that her voice has declined (Wilfred’s impatient rejoinder when she expresses her concerns – that Jean’s audiences are all dead now – is wrong if she’s a successful recording artist).  Although we’re expected to find egomania infinitely entertaining, we’re also meant to see as heartwarming Jean’s transformation from insatiably competitive bitch into a team player who’s quite a nice person really.  Being old may not be for sissies but here it’s very much a matter of turning into a Cissy, or a Cedric.  Dustin Hoffman is now seventy-five and Ronald Harwood seventy-eight and Quartet suggests that both of them may be past it.  That can’t have been the object of the exercise.

3 January 2013

[1] Having summoned the courage to watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on television, I found out the elderly characters in that had antiquated names too.